Network Function Virtualization (NFV) aims to enable many types of network equipment, by researching and developing a standard Information Technology (IT) virtualization technique, to be integrated into a mass of servers, switches and storage devices which meet industrial standards so that network functions can be performed in a series of software running on hardware of industry-standard server; the software herein may be installed or uninstalled as needed at different locations of hardware in the network, and no new hardware equipment needs to be installed.
Operators set up a Network Functions Virtualization Industry Specification Group (NFV ISG) in European Telecommunications Standard Institute (ETSI), which mainly aims, via widely adopting the standard IT virtualization technique and adopting industry-standard high-capacity servers, storage devices and switches for bearing various network software functions, for realizing software is flexibly loaded and configuration is deployed flexibly at different locations of a data centre, a network node, a user terminal and the like, thereby accelerating speed of network deployment and adjustment, reducing complexity of service deployment, improving unification, generalization, adaptability and the like of network equipment, and finally reducing the fixed assets input and operating costs of a network.
According to requirements of an ETSI NFV ISG specification, a set of automatic deployment specifications is defined in an NFV Management and Orchestration (NFV-MANO) domain to realize a flow and architecture of a set of virtualization application deployment. In this architecture, there are two function entities, namely, a Network Functions Virtualization Orchestrator (NFVO) and a Virtualized Network Function Manager (VNFM). The NFVO is responsible for managing and scheduling a Virtualized Network Function (VNF) and resources in an entire virtualization management platform; and the VNFM is responsible for managing a life period of a VNF.
The relationship among NFVO, VNFM and VNF is as shown in FIG. 1. The VNFM which is responsible for managing the life period of the VNF interacts with a plurality of VNFs in terms of network messages, and when telecommunication network equipment realizes NFV, the VNFM may be connected with a mass of VNFs, which puts forward a higher demand for processing performance of the VNFM. Further, the VNFM is a centralized manager of a virtualized sub-network to which the VNFM is ascribed; once the VNFM becomes invalid, the management of a virtualized network for all VNFs ascribed to the virtualized sub-network is invalid simultaneously.
To sum up, the VNFM function entity in the ETSI NFV ISG specification architecture cannot meet the requirements of high performance and high reliability for telecommunication network equipment.